[Hollie Maea]

It's June, and once again time for the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb. In the last 5 to 10 years, electric vehicles--both in the automobile and motorcycle classes--have gone from being a non-entity to dominating the race. Last year, of course, Volkswagen spent a small fortune to make the ultimate Pikes Peak race car--electric, of course. Their efforts paid off when they beat the all time record by a significant margin.

This year, there has been less talk about Pikes Peak EVs. But when the competitor list came out in January, one of the entries was tantalizingly titled "2019 Palatov D2EV". But there were not any details available beyond this.

We can now reveal a little more about this entry. This entry is being done by Borg Warner subsidiary Cascadia Motion (formerly Rinehart Motion Systems and AM Racing). Cascadia is supplying motors, inverters and systems integration. Our own Frodus, now an employee at Cascadia, has been taking the lead on integration over the past month. The company I work for, EVDrive, has also contributed significantly. The car itself was designed and built by local (Portland) race car builder Palatov Motorsport, which has made several (gas powered) Pikes Peaks cars in recent years.

I can't give out any specific numbers, but the power to weight ratio of this thing is mind blowing. At these power levels, it all comes down to putting it in a package that can be tamed, and piloting it by a driver with the skill and courage to push it to the limits. To that end, Cascadia and Palatov have tapped Greg Tracy, himself a multiple champion at Pikes Peak and a professional stunt driver who has driven for Hollywood block busters such as The Fast and The Furious and the Bourne movies.

Here is a little teaser. The main event is in ten days.


https://youtu.be/Klydsui19p8

 

[Hollie Maea]

Hi Brian,

Dennis Palatov has disclosed it publicly, so I can say it here: The car is, in fact, AWD.

 

[Hollie Maea]

A couple more videos from early testing at Oregon Raceway Park. I can't get the Youtube embed to work, so you'll have to click on the links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TINxmHcZ5lU


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbnejd17uxU

 

[Hollie Maea]

Thanks. The Palatov website features blogs and some other information for earlier Pikes Peak cars, but not this one. Perhaps some day there will be some 2019 information.

He actually does have a blog for this one:

http://dpcars.net/d2x/index.htm

He called it D2X when he started because he wasn't ready to reveal it was EV. But there is actually quite a bit of information there, plus lots of cool pictures and videos.

Edit: The 2019 he begins talking about on page 2.

 

[Hollie Maea]

The only technically interesting part is how the AWD is done. This is just a guess based on the photos, but it looks like front drive comes off the front of the dual motor assembly, and rear drive off the rear. There are a range of possible configurations:

• this could be a dual-core motor with output taken off of each end, driving shafts to both axles at the same speed;
• this could be a dual-core motor with solid drive to the rear and drive to the front through some sort of clutch (over-running, controlled friction, or even viscous);
• this could be a dual-core motor with a centre differential; or,
• what appears to be a dual-core motor could be separate front and rear motors, despite the common housing (unlikely because the relative front and rear power levels would not be appropriate).

There is presumably reduction gearing other than in the final drives, although speed is so high that perhaps the final ring-and-pinion sets are enough. If one reduction drive is shared between front and rear, it could be mounted at either end of the motor (presumably the rear), and the reduced output sent back through the motor's hollow shaft.

If they are driving both axles solidly at the same speed, or just letting the front over-run the rear for corners and powering when the rear slips enough, this is likely the result of their Pikes Peak experience... that with enough power that the car is usually drifting, so more sophisticated front to rear power distribution is unnecessary.

I'm sure the car will do well. It will be interesting to see how it works, and what the design really is.

If you watch the teaser in the first post very carefully you may find clues that suggest a different solution...

 

[Hollie Maea]

Correct. Here is the general layout:

 

[Hollie Maea]

Palatov has now posted images of the battery we at EVDrive built for this car, so I can share them here. This is the greatest battery we have ever made, exceeding the 315 kWh one we made for the original Nikola Motor prototype semi truck. It's very compact, liquid cooled, with an extremely robust interconnect system (the entirety of the interconnects add less than 2% resistance beyond that of the cells themselves). Apart from dragstrip packs that drain in less than a minute, this may be the most powerful battery that has ever gone into a car. We are very proud of it.











Edit: some specs: Just under 80kWh, 840V top off voltage, and 1800A peak (30s)

 

[Hollie Maea]

The three blue boxes are actually the three PM250DZ inverters. The battery boxes are in fact non symmetrical but not 2 to 1, and they are the same length.

Cells are cylindrical, 204S36P. Divided into 12S modules with embedded BMS in each module and Cold plates between each module.

 

[Hollie Maea]

We made it to the top of the mountain! Time was 9:55. Not bad at all considering how little time we had for testing and driver seat time!

 

[Hollie Maea]

Anyone have links to footage of your climb?

Even I have not seen it yet. But it should be available in the next day or two and I will post it here as soon as it is.

 

[Hollie Maea]

Great effort guys, and such a shame about the tragedies on, and off the mountain.

Travis, can you show any more detailed images of the battery packs as they came together? I've always been intrigued by the idea of cooling cylindrical cells axially because the conductivity is so much better in that plane, but there's a fair old resistance gap between the bit that's hot and the end of the cell. As someone mentioned above, it sounds like Rivian packs were used

Yes there is some resistance between the end of the roll and the cell, but far less than between the layers of the jellyroll. Literature suggests that axial heat resistivity is 10-30 times lower than radial. Our testing has confirmed that in spite of the lower surface area, cooling occurs faster on the ends than on the sides.

Rivian packs were not used, we at EVDrive designed and built the pack for this car.

 

[Hollie Maea]

As a result, it tends to get used as a demonstration event: cars are built to show the capability of a company or product, and once the point is made they move on. I think this is the case for both Palatov and Cascadia.

I'm not too sure about that. I think this car still has untapped potential. They were working on it and tweaking on it even during race week, and if you look at the qualifying times vs the race, we actually passed by 8 or 9 cars just in those last couple of days. So I think it's possible it could race again (I don't have any inside information on that either way).

But in general, for sure Dennis Palatov will be back at Pikes Peak in the future; it's kinda his thing and he goes at least every other year. And he has said publicly that he wants to continue to produce additional models of electric cars. And as long as he's doing that, you have to think that Cascadia will be involved (and hopefully us at EVDrive as well). This car just scratches the surface of what is possible with these high power components.

 

[Hollie Maea]

Rough cut video of the race. We'll have more polished video later this month.

https://youtu.be/-Bjaq4qlW0I

 

[Hollie Maea]

The car is down at Bonneville for Speed Week right now. Conditions are really bad this year (the salt is wet) but hopefully we can get some good high speed runs!

 

[Hollie Maea]

Also, here's a great new video from the race, with commentary by the driver, Greg Tracy.

https://vimeo.com/353896262